Even in Death


I grab the garden shears,
head out to the heavenly
blue morning glories dead

around the flagpole.  Only a month ago
blossom cups looked unbreakable.  
Frost can break most anything.  
A single night
shattered the glass, tendrils

like rope.  I let them be
for a few weeks, unwilling to erase
Buddha’s message from heaven.  
Courage to cut, 
to declare summer’s death.

Down they come, in tight circles,
leaves already gone.  I pull and pull.  
Even in death they cling
fiercely.

On the ground a pile of dead snakes, 
a hundred wounded clotheslines
holding the tears of August. 




​
Yellowjackets


nested in a crack 
in our front wall.  One end leads 
inside the house.  They fly 
up from the basement
to the living room bay window.  
Executioners, we vacuum them off.
They keep coming.

A few have a strange capacity
to pick me up
and drop me in places from my past— 
me sitting on the back step 
of my old house,
blabbing about the garden,
Stan cooking on the grille— 
then the stinging.  They swarmed
around the back porch light.  Or

one Illinois fall decades ago, 
they claimed straws
in sweetened iced tea, hovered
around open Coke cans.  They return me,

unstung, to where I live now.  Soon
winter will fold up
their wings for good. 






Following Directions


If I believed in step by step, 
maybe I could face them.  
Algebra left me cold.  Still,

with the garden I try
to get it right, place taller
dahlias in the back, hoping
the blooms won’t be
like tall heads blocking me 
at a theater.  The tubers
must have skipped

the directions.  A tall one
has white blooms near 
its knees.  I may as well 
have planted the tubers 
willy nilly.  

You came without directions,
love.  Me too.  
Our blossoms always come
as a surprise.